When British sailors first laid eyes on the giant volcanic crater that Hawaiian natives called Leahi, on Oahu’s southeastern coast, they thought they saw millions of tiny, glittering diamonds embedded in the mountain of compressed ash. They were wrong: The glitter turned out to be calcite, as common as the limestone of which it’s a component and about as valuable. But the name they bestowed on the majestic ridge, Diamond Head, stuck—a catchier and more tourist-friendly improvement on the original, which roughly translates to “shaped like the forehead of a tuna.”

Today, Honolulu’s Diamond Head is the most recognizable natural wonder on a chain of islands that boasts far too many to mention. And nestled near the base of Diamond Head is a house that seems to know precisely how fortunate it is to be sited on one of the most magnificent swaths of coastline in the world, taking full advantage of the unsurpassed views and gentle breezes that have drawn people to Hawaii for centuries.

The house takes full advantage of the unsurpassed views and gentle breezes that have drawn people to Hawaii for centuries.

Designer Jacques Saint Dizier is headquartered across an ocean in northern California, where, many years ago, he had first worked with a married couple who were now looking to buy or build in Honolulu. On one of several reconnaissance missions to Hawaii, Saint Dizier and his clients encountered what local real estate agents were referring to as a “tear-down”—though Saint Dizier acknowledges that a tear-down in this neighborhood, mere minutes away from Waikiki, doesn’t really mean what it means in the rest of the country. “It was the most stunning lot I’d ever seen in all my searches,” he says. “We started imagining what kind of house could be on this amazing cliff that terraces down.”

Once the property was purchased, Saint Dizier’s clients brought in architect Donald Botsai and landscape architect Randall Monaghan, both of Oahu, to begin working on what essentially became a new house built on the footprint, and over the partial frame, of the original. “If we had torn the house down, it would have been an impossible lot to build a house on,” says Saint Dizier, citing the difficulty of reproducing aspects of the original architecture — such as the master bedroom, separated from the Pacific Ocean by a single wall and eight and a half feet of island. “It’s just magnificent; you feel like you’re floating over the water.”

The clients are world travelers whose tastes in furnishings and art might be described as Asian Transitional— pieces that reference Japan, Indonesia and other Asian locales but that do so casually, devoid of heavy-handedness. In the study, for instance, custom cabinets were built around a set of reclaimed 100-year-old bamboo mat inserts that gleam like new; the desk subtly mimics the form of the gates found in Japanese temples. Saint Dizier himself designed cabinetry in the master bath that takes its cues from tansu.

The views are of the sort that dreams and travel brochures are made. It wasn’t enough to have rooms simply face the ocean: With views this spectacular, they had to do so spectacularly. Via a painstakingly designed and installed system, the living room’s glass-paneled walls—all 32 feet of them—slide and disappear into unobtrusive pockets. When they do, the adjacent lanai becomes part of the living room, its boundary indistinguishable.

One of Saint Dizier’s favorite elements is the house’s unique floating staircase, a sweeping helix of wood and metal that is the brainchild of artist Michael Bondi. Steps of gleaming bamboo curve up a corner; the bronze rail is designed to resemble a jumble of reeds tied together with sashes, an artful abstraction of the kind of simple bamboo fence that is crafted from abundant local materials. It’s functional and fantastic, solid and ethereal at the same time. “It certainly speaks to what we were trying to do,” says Saint Dizier.

Diamond Head, alas, has no real diamonds. But it’s hard to believe those hopeful British sailors stayed disappointed for long. Not far from where they saw what natives and visitors alike have always thought of as the closest thing to paradise on earth, a house allows its inhabitants—and their lucky guests—to experience that paradise fully, freely and forever.